Bricolage

In French, a bricoleur is a handyman, someone who makes do with whatever materials are at hand rather than acquiring the precise tool for the job. The word bricolage, meaning the activity of the bricoleur, traces to the Old French bricoler, which originally described an indirect or zigzag motion, as in a ball bouncing off a wall.1

The word entered intellectual vocabulary in 1962, when the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss used it in The Savage Mind to describe a fundamental mode of human thought.2 Lévi-Strauss contrasted the bricoleur with the engineer. The engineer designs from first principles, selecting the right tool for a defined problem. The bricoleur works with a finite repertoire of materials already on hand, combining and repurposing them to solve whatever problem arises.

Lévi-Strauss argued that mythological thinking operates like bricolage. Cultures assemble meaning from available symbols, narratives, and images, recombining them to address new situations rather than inventing from scratch. The concept proved influential well beyond anthropology.

In business theory, management scholars adopted bricolage to describe how entrepreneurs in resource-constrained environments build ventures by recombining existing assets. Ted Baker and Reed Nelson published a foundational study in 2005 identifying bricolage as a distinct entrepreneurial strategy.3

The word names something that formal education rarely teaches. Schools and corporate training programs typically emphasize planning, specialization, and the acquisition of correct tools. Bricolage describes the opposite capacity, the ability to improvise effectively with whatever is available.

The Italian arrangiarsi, the Brazilian gambiarra, and the Indian jugaad all describe variations of the same instinct. The French contribution was not the practice itself but the elevation of it into a concept worth naming.